DAILY MAIL COMMENT: The day justice was turned on its head

John Downey will not be prosecuted after being given 'no trial' guarantee

Beaming in triumph, the IRA veteran believed responsible for a mass murder that horrified the nation walks free from the Old Bailey.

Truly, this was a dark day for justice – a day when morality was turned on its head and the bereaved were robbed of every Briton’s birthright to see decency upheld and evil avenged in a court of law.

It was also the moment when the full scale of Tony Blair’s sell-out of our country’s most fundamental principles, bartered away to terrorists like trinkets in a bazaar, was laid bare before the world.

For it was not on the balance of the evidence that John Downey was spared answering for the unimaginably cruel slaughter of four young Household Cavalrymen and seven horses, cut down by a nail bomb in Hyde Park on their way to change the guard at Buckingham Palace.

No, his trial collapsed simply because he had a letter from the Blair government, signed by the then Attorney General, granting him immunity from prosecution.

Leave aside the appalling blunder by the Northern Irish police, who have admitted that Downey should not have received that letter in 2007, since Scotland Yard had already gathered enough evidence to mount a case against him.

Even this denial of justice, through gross incompetence, pales beside the wholesale betrayal of the dead and bereaved, agreed in secret by Mr Blair.

True, we have known for more than 15 years that he made sweeping concessions – agonising for everyone with a sense of right and wrong – to terrorists on both sides of the sectarian divide.

But only now is it clear just how far he was prepared to abase himself and our country’s values in his abject surrender to the IRA’s Gerry Adams and his blood-soaked henchman, Martin McGuinness.

For until Downey’s release, we knew nothing of these letters. Indeed, so secret were they that not even the current First Minister of Northern Ireland – responsible for policing and justice in the province – was allowed to hear of them. (And whatever anyone’s opinion of Peter Robinson, he is surely justified in his anger).

Yet incredibly, it now emerges that no fewer than 187 such ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ passes were handed out in a disgusting surrender to Semtex and the Kalashnikov.

Tragic: The Hyde Park bombing in 1982 killed four soldiers and seven horses, as well as injuring 31 people

Heaven knows, the war-weary people of Northern Ireland have suffered many humiliations in the name of the ‘peace process’ – not least the stomach-churning appointment of Mr McGuinness as deputy First Minister. We can only pray that they will bear this one too, through gritted teeth, with the same fortitude and patience.

But there is one affront to justice and decency that nobody should be asked to endure any longer.

Consider the sickening contrast between Mr Blair’s indulgence of the terrorists and his grotesque betrayal of our soldiers who were caught up in the mayhem of Bloody Sunday in 1972.

Not only did he subject them to the 12-year ordeal of the Saville Inquiry, as yet another sop to the IRA. Even now, the authorities are considering whether to prosecute them for their conduct in the panic of that awful day.

So their suffering continues, four decades on, while an IRA veteran suspected of the sadistic, premeditated murder of their fellow servicemen slaps justice in the face with his letter of immunity.

If David Cameron has any sense of our debt to the Armed Forces, shouldn’t he instruct the Attorney General to write similar letters to every Bloody Sunday soldier who remains under the shadow of a prison cell?

If it could be done for our most vicious enemies, then surely we owe no less to the men who risked their lives to protect us.